Our old DNS-323 is showing it's age in the office, maxing throughput at around 22 MB/s on our Gigabit switch on large file copies and backups.

I'm looking for suggestions for a NAS and drives capable of 100 MB/s throughput in bursts and 60 MB/s in sustained modes.

I came across the Thecus N5550 which seems to fit the requirements at a cost of around $450 (plus drives). Any other suggestions? Oh, drive size is not a real issue, we currently have around 200 GB of drawings and Excel files after 4 years, so a couple of 2 TB drives should cover us for the life of the NAS.

Built a new haswell i3 based WHS with a Intel CT desktop adapter and 4tb Seagte RAID drives. I get around mid 70MB/sec sustained and 108 burst. Using Drivebender for pooling/duplication and was a breeze to move my pool to the new chipset and swap the drives. Everyone usually has the gear laying around to build these and WHS is found for around 60 bux while drivebender has been eternally on sale for 17bux.

Add some of the add-ins like Lights Out and PS3 Server and it was love at first boot.

Not for everyone, but has WHS and DB has been the ticket for me.

__________________"It's time to kick gum, and chew ass. And I'm all out of gum."

Budget, I'd say under $600. I'm really looking for a plug and play solution rather than build my own as reliability is absolutely key (currently running Raid 1 with weekly local and monthly offsite backups). The current NAS is mapped as a drive on our Windows XP Pro / 7 machines, no server in the network.

I finally educated our drafting detailers on why we store drawings on the NAS rather than a local drive when one of their machines blew up taking 2 weeks of work with it. I'm also trying to go paperless with our estimating process, and adoption will be easier if we have a speedier response time for opening large PDF files for markups (up to 300 MB).

We have a crappy ADSL line that runs a whole 3 Mb/s down 100 Kb/s up so cloud storage is out.

I have a QNAP TS-469L with 4x WD Red 3TB in RAID6. I get anywhere between 60-80MB/s sustained depending on the files being copied and bursts up to full gigabit speed (112MB/s give or take). Performance was far worse with the previous version of QTS (3.6.x I believe). QTS 4.x brings huge improvements in both performance and the web layout.

No stability issues thus far to speak of. Right now I'm sitting at 37 days uptime, though I've had it since last Christmas. I usually reboot everything in my house roughly once a month though.

From what I gathered when I settled on this model, all the ARM-based units will not achieve the performance you want. You'll definitely need an Atom-based unit instead.